ABOUT

M. Shadee Malaklou is a critical race, gender, and sexuality studies scholar with expertise in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Her writings intervene in Enlightenment humanism’s racist metric of time, querying sex and gender as visual markers of historical-racial difference. She dives deep into the philosophies of Man, finding that racial blackness has been written into the historical record as the human’s antecedent and Other, made relevant only as the constant against which human movements of arrival and “beyond” are measured. Accordingly, racially black persons cannot simulate the forward-march of history that will ‘progress’ their expressions of sex, gender, and sexuality from the ars erotica of the bush to the scientia sexualis of modern sex. As the bush’s proper inhabitants, they exist in a time before (human) time, where gender is undifferentiated and sexuality is unchecked. No longer what a person does, sex, gender, and sexuality are, in a post-Enlightenment humanist world, taxonomy and type of identity, or who a person is. To be left behind by history’s march of progress, to be without access to time as a moving marker, as black persons are, is to be ineligible for human identity markers like gender and sexuality. Malaklou’s research thus rethinks cis-hetero patriarchy as a symptom of antiblack humanism, troubling understandings of intersectionality that do not attend to that particular nexus.

In addition to writing for academic journals, she regularly publishes think pieces, most recently, in The Conversationalist, The Feminist Wire, and CounterPunch; and periodically contributes to Always Already: A Critical Theory Podcast as the Frantz Fanon correspondent. Prior to joining Berea College as the Inaugural Director and founder of the bell hooks center and Chair and (at the time) Assistant Professor of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department, Malaklou served as Assistant Professor (2016-2019) and Acting Chair (2018-2019) of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College, where she was also a Mellon Faculty Fellow for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (2016-2018) and a faculty curator of Beloit’s Wright Museum of Art (2017-2018). In addition to her role at Berea College, Malaklou currently serves as visiting faculty in the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University in Montreal. She received her PhD in Culture and Theory and graduate certificates in Critical Theory and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Irvine in 2016 and her BA in Cultural Anthropology and Women's Studies from Duke University in 2007.